Tracking specific cost categories - pointers?

scottw

For the projects I manage, I need to budget specific cost categories rather than the overall budget. These are:

materials
capital usage
labour (this doesn't need be associated with a particular resource)
overhead (defined as a fixed proportion of labour, so I could track both combined as a single entry)
subcontract
travel and subsistence
other

so that any task could have amounts for one or more of these. The reason is that contractually the budget is split up like this rather than having a single overall figure.

I can see how to add cost items of different types to a task (initially types are Consulting, Charges, Material, Room, but I can see how to change those defaults to the types that I want to use. This looks hopeful - a place to enter the information I want to track. But how do I get that out in a usable form? What would be of great help to me would be to get a Work Breakdown view which would show the costs for my seven categories as separate columns. Is this possible, or something approaching it?

Less important, but still useful: is there a way to ge a spend profile? That is, a table of spend broken down by month or quarter. I have to forecast how much I will draw down, and this would help a lot.

vicky

Hi,

you can change the types to what you need in Settings > Value Lists > For > Cost

Basic costs will show as sums in a Work breakdown view.
And could get exported in a PDF thus: https://www.projectwizards.net/en/blog/2023/02/merlin-project-basecost-asciidoc-pdf-script

Or... you enter those costs as Information attachments, and get them listed in an Attachments view.

By a spend profile… do you maybe need a cash flow similar to this?
https://www.projectwizards.net/en/blog/2017/12/sup-cashflow

Best regards

scottw

Hi Vicky
Thanks for this. The spend profile is just what I need for that part of the question. However for the cost categories, I need to keep the categories separate, not sum them. The ideal would be a Work Breakdown view where there is a column for Materials costs, a column for Subcontract costs, a column for T&S costs, and so on. Is there perhaps a way to define a Work Breakdown column which applies a filter to Cost to sum only cost entries for a task matching a category?

Alternatively it looks as though I might be able to modify your script to give me a CSV file which would give me a table, with each row being a task and each column being a cost category. Does that sound feasible? I'd like to get a sanity check before I put too much time in.
Thanks